Erowid Psychoactive Vaults : "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley  


              



      THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION
      ALDOUS HUXLEY

      Harper & Row, Publishers, New York 1963 




      It was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the 
      first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was 
      subsequently given. Anhalonium lewinii was new to science. To primitive 
      religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a 
      friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a 
      friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New 
      World, "they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as 
      though it were a deity." 
      Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such 
      eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began 
      their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote. True, 
      they stopped short at a point well this side of idolatry; but all 
      concurred in assigning to mescalin a position among drugs of unique 
      distinction. Administered in suitable doses, it changes the quality of 
      consciousness more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other 
      substance in the pharmacologist's repertory. 
      Mescalin research has been going on sporadically ever since the days of 
      Lewin and Havelock Ellis. Chemists have not merely isolated the alkaloid; 
      they have learned how to synthesize it, so that the supply no longer 
      depends on the sparse and intermittent crop of a desert cactus. Alienists 
      have dosed themselves with mescalin in the hope thereby of coming to a 
      better, a first-hand, understanding of their patients' mental processes. 
      Working unfortunately upon too few subjects within too narrow a range of 
      circumstances, psychologists have observed and catalogued some of the 
      drug's more striking effects. Neurologists and physiologists have found 
      out something about the mechanism of its action upon the central nervous 
      system. And at least one Professional philosopher has taken mescalin for 
      the light it may throw on such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of 
      mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness. 
      There matters rested until, two or three years ago, a new and perhaps 
      highly significant fact was observed.* Actually the fact had been staring 
      everyone in the face for several decades; but nobody, as it happened, had 
      noticed it until a Young English psychiatrist, at present working in 
      Canada, was struck by the close similarity, in chemical composition, 
      between mescalin and adrenalin. Further research revealed that lysergic 
      acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot, has a 
      structural biochemical relationship to the others. Then came the discovery 
      that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of adrenalin, 
      can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But 
      adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other 
      words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute 
      doses of which are known to cause Profound changes in consciousness. 
      Certain of these changes are similar to those which occur in that most 
      characteristic plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia. Is the 
      mental disorder due to a chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder 
      due, in its turn, to psychological distresses affecting the adrenals? It 
      would be rash and premature to affirm it. The most we can say is that some 
      kind of a prima facie case has been made out. Meanwhile the clue is being 
      systematically followed, the sleuths--biochemists , psychiatrists, 
      psychologists--are on the trail. 
      By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I found myself, 
      in the spring of 1953, squarely athwart that trail. One of the sleuths had 
      come on business to California. In spite of seventy years of mescalin 
      research, the psychological material at his disposal was still absurdly 
      inadequate, and he was anxious to add to it. I was on the spot and 
      willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus it came about that, one 
      bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin 
      dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results. 
      We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in 
      all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into 
      the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try 
      to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in 
      vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and 
      enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies--all these are 
      private and, ex- cept through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. 
      We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences 
      themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of 
      island universes. 
      Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of 
      inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." 
      Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole 
      with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of 
      course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain 
      cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. 
      The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the 
      exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men 
      and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to 
      serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, 
      but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer 
      belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience. 
      To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less 
      important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what 
      if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically 
      alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually 
      feels like to be mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a 
      medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to 
      Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a 
      man at the extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put himself 
      in the place of one at the limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or, 
      except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings of one who 
      stands at the limits of mesomorphy and somatotonia? To the unmitigated 
      behaviorist such questions, I suppose, are meaningless. But for those who 
      theoretically believe what in practice they know to be true--namely, that 
      there is an inside to experience as well as an out- side--the problems 
      posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely 
      insoluble, some soluble only in exceptional circumstances and by methods 
      not available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that I shall 
      never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the 
      other hand, it had always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, 
      for ex- ample, or autohypnosis, by means of systematic meditation, or else 
      by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of 
      consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, 
      the medium, even the mystic were talking about. 
      From what I had read of the mescalin experience I was convinced in advance 
      that the drug would admit me, at least for a few hours, into the kind of 
      inner world described by Blake and AE. But what I had expected did not 
      happen. I had expected to lie with my eyes shut, looking at visions of 
      many-colored geometries, of animated architectures, rich with gems and 
      fabulously lovely, of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas 
      trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation. But I had 
      not reckoned, it was evident, with the idiosyncrasies of my mental 
      make-up, the facts of my temperament, training and habits. 
      I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor 
      visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures 
      in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I 
      recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly 
      seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very 
      vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used 
      to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the 
      only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a 
      half miles an hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely 
      no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in 
      the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, 
      who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature 
      do my mental images come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty 
      of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, 
      limited and uninteresting. This was the world--a poor thing but my 
      own--which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike 
      itself. 
      The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense 
      revolutionary. Half an hour after swallowing the drug I became aware of a 
      slow dance of golden lights. A little later there were sumptuous red 
      surfaces swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated 
      with a continuously changing, patterned life. At another time the closing 
      of my eyes revealed a complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish 
      spheres kept emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would 
      slide noiselessly upwards, out of sight. But at no time were there faces 
      or forms of men or animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no 
      magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a 
      drama or a parable. The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not 
      the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my 
      eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had 
      happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant. 
      I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my 
      study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only 
      three flowers-a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint 
      at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and 
      cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, 
      the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the 
      little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast 
      that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But 
      that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower 
      arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his 
      creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. 
      "Is it agreeable?" somebody asked. (During this Part of the experiment, 
      all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been 
      possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.) 
      "Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is." 
      Istigkeit--wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." 
      The Being of Platonic philosophy-- except that Plate seems to have made 
      the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and 
      identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could 
      never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own 
      inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance 
      with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose 
      and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and 
      nothing less, than what they were--a transience that was yet eternal life, 
      a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of 
      minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet 
      self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. 
      I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to 
      detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing--but of a breathing without 
      returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated 
      flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. 
      Words like "grace" and "transfigu- ration" came to my mind, and this, of 
      course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled 
      from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to 
      the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific 
      Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I 
      understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a 
      distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables 
      referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's 
      essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the 
      Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) 
      The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered 
      novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the 
      Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the man who 
      realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, '"what, may I ask, is 
      he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and 
      answers, "A golden-haired lion." 
      It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. 
      Now it was all as clear as day, as evi- dent as Euclid. Of course the 
      Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At 
      the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was 
      anything that I--or rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from 
      my throttling embrace--cared to look at. The books, for example, with 
      which my study walls were lined. Like the flowers, they glowed, when I 
      looked at them, with brighter colors, a profounder significance. Red 
      books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of 
      agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose color was 
      so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the 
      point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my 
      attention. 
      "What about spatial relationships?" the investigator inquired, as I was 
      looking at the books. 
      It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and 
      the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these 
      were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that 
      spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was 
      perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At 
      ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?--How 
      far? How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the 
      implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place 
      and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in 
      terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships 
      within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their 
      positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was 
      the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some the 
      glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the 
      three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category 
      of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so 
      quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was 
      still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily 
      concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning. 
      And along with indifference to space there went an even more complete 
      indifference to time. 
      "There seems to be plenty of it," was all I would answer, when the 
      investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. 
      Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of 
      course, have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another 
      universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite 
      duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one 
      continually changing apocalypse. 
      From the books the investigator directed my attention to the furniture. A 
      small typing table stood in the center of the room; beyond it, from my 
      point of view, was a wicker chair and beyond that a desk. The three pieces 
      formed an intricate pattern of horizontals, uprights and diagonals--a 
      pattern all the more interesting for not being interpreted in terms of 
      spatial relationships. Table, chair and desk came together in a 
      composition that was like something by Braque or Juan Gris, a still life 
      recognizably related to the objective world, but rendered without depth, 
      without any attempt at photographic realism. I was looking at my 
      furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at 
      desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as 
      the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships 
      within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this 
      purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe 
      as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I 
      was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the 
      Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. The legs, for example, 
      of that chair--how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their 
      poiished smoothness! I spent several minutes--or was it several 
      centuries?--not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being 
      them---or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for 
      "I" was not in- volved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") 
      being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair. 
      Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent 
      Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do well to 
      consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the 
      type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and 
      sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and 
      nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not 
      productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that 
      has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening 
      everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system 
      is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of 
      largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we 
      should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that 
      very small and special selection which is likely to be practically 
      useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at 
      Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to 
      survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be 
      funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What 
      comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of 
      consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this 
      Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced 
      awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems 
      and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at 
      once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which 
      he has been born--the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the 
      accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as 
      it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness 
      and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take 
      his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the 
      language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced 
      awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various 
      "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so 
      many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. 
      Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing 
      valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain 
      persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents 
      the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either 
      spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises," or 
      through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or 
      temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception "of everything 
      that is happening everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass does not 
      abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind 
      at Large), but something more than, and above ah something different from, 
      the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual 
      minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality. 
      The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to 
      co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of 
      glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these 
      enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that 
      is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain's normal 
      ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and 
      therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to 
      the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be 
      summarized as follows. 
        The ability to remember and to "think straight" is little if at all 
        reduced. (Listening to the recordings of my conversation under the 
        influence of the drug, I cannot discover that I was then any stupider 
        than I am at ordinary times.) 
        Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of 
        the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not 
        immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in 
        space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero. 
        Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though perception is 
        enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change for the worse. 
        The mescalin taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular and 
        finds most of the causes for which, at ordinary times, he was prepared 
        to act and suffer, profoundly uninteresting. He can't be bothered with 
        them, for the good reason that he has better things to think about. 
        These better things may be experienced (as I experienced them) "out 
        there," or "in here," or in both worlds, the inner and the outer, 
        simultaneously or successively. That they are better seems to be 
        self-evident to all mescalin takers who come to the drug with a sound 
        liver and an untroubled mind. 
      These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to 
      follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the 
      efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of 
      sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake 
      the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal 
      relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the 
      world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all 
      kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases there 
      may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of 
      visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite 
      value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, uncon- 
      ceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an "obscure 
      knowledge" that All is in all--that All is actually each. This is as near, 
      I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to "perceiving everything that 
      is happening everywhere in the universe." 
      In this context, how significant is the enormous heightening, under 
      mescalin, of the perception of color! For certain animals it is 
      biologically very important to be able to distinguish certain hues. But 
      beyond the limits of their utilitarian spectrum, most creatures are 
      completely color blind. Bees, for example, spend most of their time 
      "deflowering the fresh virgins of the spring"; but, as Von Frisch has 
      shown, they can recognize only a very few colors. Man's highly developed 
      color sense is a biological luxury--inestimably precious to him as an 
      intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an 
      animal. To judge by the adjectives which Homer puts into their mouths, the 
      heroes of the Trojan War hardly excelled the bees in their capacity to 
      distinguish colors. In this respect, at least, mankind's advance has been 
      prodigious. 
      Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient 
      aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary 
      times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the 
      socalled secondary characters of things are primary. Unlike Locke, it 
      evidently feels that colors are more important, better worth attending to, 
      than masses, positions and dimensions. Like mescalin takers, many mystics 
      perceive supernaturally brilliant colors, not only with the inward eye, 
      but even in the objective world around them. Similar reports are made by 
      psychics and sensitives. There are certain mediums to whom the mescalin 
      taker's brief revelation is a matter, during long periods, of daily and 
      hourly experience. 
      From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of theory, we 
      may now return to the miraculous facts--four bamboo chair legs in the 
      middle of a room. Like Wordsworth's daffodils, they brought all manner of 
      wealth--the gift, beyond price, of a new direct insight into the very 
      Nature of Things, together with a more modest treasure of understanding in 
      the field, especially, of the arts. 
      A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St. 
      Michael and all angels. Four or five hours after the event, when the 
      effects of a cerebral sugar shortage were wearing off, I was taken for a 
      little tour of the city, which included a visit, towards sundown, to what 
      is modestly claimed to be the World's Biggest Drug Store. At the back of 
      the W.B.D.S., among the toys, the greeting cards and the comics, stood a 
      row, surprisingly enough, of art books. I picked up the first volume that 
      came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened 
      was "The Chair"--that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad 
      painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his 
      canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly 
      inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence 
      as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the 
      chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more 
      than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been 
      manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem. Such emblems are sources of 
      true knowledge about the Nature of Things, and this true knowledge may 
      serve to prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on its 
      own account. But that is all. However expressive, symbols can never be the 
      things they stand for. 
      It would be interesting, in this context, to make a study of the works of 
      art available to the great knowers of Suchness. What sort of pictures did 
      Eckhart look at? What sculptures and paintings played a part in the 
      religious experience of St. John of the Cross, of Hakuin, of Hui-neng, of 
      William Law? The questions are beyond my power to answer; but I strongly 
      suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little 
      attention to art--some refusing to have anything to do with it at all, 
      others being content with what a critical eye would regard as second-rate, 
      or even, tenth-rate, works. (To a person whose transfigured and 
      transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or 
      tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most 
      sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else 
      for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content 
      with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they 
      signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner. 
      I returned the Van Gogh to its rack and picked up the volume standing next 
      to it. It was a book on Botti- celli. I turned the pages. "The Birth of 
      Venus"-never one of my favorites. "Mars and Venus," that loveliness so 
      passionately denounced by poor Ruskin at the height of his long-drawn 
      sexual tragedy. The marvelously rich and intricate "Calumny of Apelles." 
      And then a somewhat less familiar and not very good picture, "Judith." My 
      attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale 
      neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim's hairy head or the 
      vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith's 
      pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts. 
      This was something I had seen before-seen that very morning, between the 
      flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on 
      passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the 
      trousers--what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the 
      texture of the gray flannel--how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! 
      And here they were again, in Botticelli's picture. 
      Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no 
      portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without 
      representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the 
      origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of 
      drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, 
      have always loved drapery for its own sake---or, rather, for their own. 
      When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, 
      for all practical purposes, are non-representational-the kind of uncon- 
      ditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition 
      like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly 
      human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of 
      the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on the 
      inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these 
      non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as 
      important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the 
      tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is 
      being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to 
      life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth 
      surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero's draperies. Torn between 
      fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but 
      caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial 
      abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the 
      everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric--the heroism, the holiness, the 
      sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain. 
      And here are El Greco's disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here 
      are the sharp, twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his 
      figures: in the first, tra- ditional spirituality breaks down into a 
      nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized 
      sense of the world's essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider 
      Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for balls and 
      harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the 
      Cythera of every lover's dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, 
      excruciating sensibility of their creator find expression, not in the 
      actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the 
      relief and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and 
      doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or 
      confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and 
      wrinkles, with an incessant modulation--inner uncertainty rendered with 
      the perfect assurance of a master hand---of tone into tone, of one 
      indeterminate color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In 
      the plastic arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that which 
      disposes is ultimately the artist's temperament, proximately (at least in 
      portraiture, history and genre) the carved or painted drapery. Between 
      them, these two may decree that a fete galante shall move to tears, that a 
      crucifixion shall be serene to the point of cheerfulness, that a 
      stigmatization shall be almost intolerably sexy, that the likeness of a 
      prodigy of female brainlessness (I am thinking now of Ingres' incomparable 
      Mme. Moitessier) shall express the austerest, the most uncompromising 
      intellectuality. 
      But this is not the whole story. Draperies, as I had now discovered, are 
      much more than devices for the introduction of non-representational forms 
      into naturalistic paintings and sculptures. What the rest of us see only 
      under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to 
      see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or 
      socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large 
      oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It 
      is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the 
      artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that 
      stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of 
      pure being. More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those 
      wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were 
      charged with "is-ness." To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot 
      say. Is it, perhaps, because the forms of folded drapery are so strange 
      and dramatic that they catch the eye and in this way force the miraculous 
      fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows? What is important 
      is less the reason for the experience than the experience itself. Poring 
      over Judith's skirts, there in the World's Biggest Drug Store, I knew that 
      Botticelli--and not Botticelli alone, but many others too-had looked at 
      draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been 
      mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity 
      of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. 
      Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of 
      pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the 
      highest art to express. But in Judith's skirt I could clearly see what, if 
      I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old gray flannels. 
      Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but enough to 
      delight generation after generation of beholders, enough to make them 
      understand at least a little of the true significance of what, in our 
      pathetic imbecility, we call "mere things" and disregard in favor of 
      television. 
      "This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my 
      trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves, at the legs of 
      my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. "This is how one ought to see, 
      how things really are." And yet there were reservations. For if one always 
      saw like this, one would never want to do anything else. Just looking, 
      just being the divine Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel. 
      That would be enough. But in that case what about other people? What about 
      human relations? In the recording of that morning's conversations I find 
      the question constantly repeated, "What about human relations?" How could 
      one reconcile this timeless bliss of seeing as one ought to see with the 
      temporal duties of doing what one ought to do and feeling as one ought to 
      feel? "One ought to be able," I said, "to see these trousers as infinitely 
      im- portant and human beings as still more infinitely important." One 
      ought-but in practice it seemed to be impossible. This participation in 
      the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, 
      the necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns 
      involving persons. For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I 
      was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of 
      the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the 
      appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, 
      and of other selves, its one-time fel- lows, seemed not indeed distasteful 
      (for distastefulness was not one of the categories in terms of which I was 
      thinking), but enormously irrelevant. Compelled by the investigator to 
      analyze and report on what I was doing (and how I longed to be left alone 
      with Eternity in a flower, Infinity in four chair legs and the Absolute in 
      the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!), I realized that I was 
      deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the room, 
      deliberately refraining from being too much aware of them. One was my 
      wife, the other a man I respected and greatly liked; but both belonged to 
      the world from which, for the moment, mescalin had delivered me "e world 
      of selves, of time, of moral judgments and utilitarian considerations, the 
      world (and it was this aspect of human life which I wished, above all 
      else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of overvalued words 
      and idolatrously worshiped notions. 
      At this stage of the proceedings I was handed a large colored reproduction 
      of the well-known self-portrait by C6zanne-the head and shoulders of a man 
      in a large straw hat, red-cheeked, red-lipped, with rich black whiskers 
      and a dark unfriendly eye. It is a magnificent painting; but it was not as 
      a painting that I now saw it. For the head promptly took on a third 
      dimension and came to life as a small goblin-like man looking out through 
      a window in the page before me. I started to laugh. And when they asked me 
      why, "What pretensions!" I kept repeating. "Who on earth does he think he 
      is?" The question was not addressed to Cezanne in particular, but to the 
      human species at large. Who did they all think they were? 
      "It's like Arnold Bennett in the Dolomites," I said, suddenly remembering 
      a scene, happily immortalized in a snapshot, of A.B., some four or five 
      years before his death, toddling along a wintry road at Cortina d'Ampezzo. 
      Around him lay the virgin snow; in the background was a more than gothic 
      aspiration of red crags. And there was dear, kind, unhappy A.B., 
      consciously overacting the role of his favorite character in fiction, 
      himself, the Card in person. There he went, toddling slowly in the bright 
      Alpine sunshine, his thumbs in the armholes of a yellow waistcoat which 
      bulged, a little lower down, with the graceful curve of a Regency bow 
      window at Brighten--his head thrown back as though to aim some stammered 
      utterance, howitzer-like, at the blue dome of heaven. What he actually 
      said, I have forgotten; but what his whole manner, air and posture fairly 
      shouted was, "I'm as good as those damned mountains." And in some ways, of 
      course, he was infinitely better; but not, as he knew very well, in the 
      way his favorite character in fiction liked to imagine. 
      Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact 
      the part of our favorite character in fiction. And the fact, the almost 
      infinitely unlikely fact, of actually being Cezanne makes no difference. 
      For the consummate painter, with his little pipeline to Mind at Large 
      by-passing the brain valve and ego-filter, was also and just as genuinely 
      this whiskered goblin with the unfriendly eye. 
      For relief I turned back to the folds in my trousers. "This is how one 
      ought to see," I repeated yet again. And I might have added,' 'These are 
      the sort of things one ought to look at." Things without pretensions, 
      satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their Suchness, not 
      acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the 
      Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of god. 
      "The nearest approach to this," I said, "would be a Vermeer." 
      Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was truly gifted-with the 
      vision that perceives the Dharma-Body as the hedge at the bottom of the 
      garden, with the talent to render as much of that vision as the 
      limitations of human capacity permit, and with the prudence to confine 
      himself in his paintings to the more manageable aspects of reality; for 
      though Vermeer represented human beings, he was always a painter of still 
      life. Cezanne, who told his female sitters to do their best to look like 
      apples, tried to paint portraits in the same spirit. But his pippin-like 
      women are more nearly related to Plato's Ideas than to the Dharma-Body in 
      the hedge. They are Eternity and Infinity seen, not in sand or flower, but 
      in the abstractions of some very superior brand of geometry. Vermeer never 
      asked his girls to look like apples. On the contrary, he insisted on their 
      being girls to the very limit--but always with the proviso that they 
      refrain from behaving girlishly. They might sit or quietly stand but never 
      giggle, never display self-consciousness, never say their prayers or pine 
      for absent sweethearts, never gossip, never gaze enviously at other 
      women's babies, never dirt, never love or hate or work. In the act of 
      doing any of these things they would doubtless become more intensely 
      themselves, but would cease, for that very reason, to manifest their 
      divine essential Not-self. In Blake's phrase, the doors of Vermeer's 
      perception were only partially cleansed. A sin- gle panel had become 
      almost perfectly transparent; the rest of the door was still muddy. The 
      essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in living 
      creatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was 
      visible only when they were in repose, their minds untroubled, their 
      bodies motionless. In these circumstances Vermeer could see Suchness in 
      all its heavenly beauty---could see and, in some small measure, render 
      it-in a subtle and sumptuous still life. Vermeer is undoubtedly the 
      greatest painter of human still lives. But there have been others, for 
      example, Vermeer's French contemporaries, the Le Nain brothers. They set 
      out, I suppose, to be genre painters; but what they actually produced was 
      a series of human still lives, in which their cleansed perception of the 
      infinite significance of all things is rendered not, as with Vermeer, by 
      subtle enrichment of color and texture, but by a heightened clarity, an 
      obsessive distinctness of form, within an austere, almost monochromatic 
      tonality. In our own day we have had Vuillard, the painter, at his best, 
      of unforgettably splendid pictures of the Dharma-Body manifested in a 
      bourgeois bedroom, of the Absolute blazing away in the midst of some 
      stockbroker's family in a suburban garden, taking tea. 
      Ce qui fait que I'ancien bandagiste renie
      Le compioit dont le faste allechait les passants,
      C'est son jardin d'Auteuil, ou, veufs de rout encens,
      Les Zinnias ont I'air d'etre en tole vernie. 
      For Laurent Tailhade the spectacle was merely obscene. But if the retired 
      rubber goods merchant had sat still enough, Vuillard would have seen in 
      him only the Dharma-Body, would have painted, in the zinnias, the goldfish 
      pool, the villa's Moorish tower and Chinese lanterns, a corner of Eden 
      before the Fall. 
      But meanwhile my question remained unanswered. How was this cleansed 
      perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with human relations, 
      with the necessary chores and duties, to say nothing of charity and 
      practical compassion? The age-old debate between the actives and the 
      contemplatives was being renewed--renewed, so far as I was concerned, with 
      an unprecedented poignancy. For until this morning I had known contem- 
      plation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms--as discursive 
      thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a 
      patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest 
      writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in 
      Nature, of Wordsworth's "something far more deeply interfused"; as 
      systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an "obscure knowledge." 
      But now I knew con- templation at its height. At its height, but not yet 
      in its fullness. For in its fullness the way of Mary includes the way of 
      Martha and raises it, so to speak, to its own higher power. Mescalin opens 
      up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha. It gives access 
      to contemplation--but to a contemplation that is incompatible with action 
      and even with the will to action, the very thought of action. In the 
      intervals between his revelations the mescalin taker is apt to feel that, 
      though in one way everything is supremely as it should be, in another 
      there is something wrong. His problem is essentially the same as that 
      which confronts the quietist, the arhat and, on another level, the 
      landscape painter and the painter of human still lives. Mescalin can never 
      solve that problem; it can only pose it, apocalyptically, for those to 
      whom it had never before presented itself. The full and final solution can 
      be found only by those who are prepared to implement the right kind of 
      Welranschauung by means of the right kind of behavior and the right kind 
      of con- stant and unstrained alertness. Over against the quietist stands 
      the active-contemplative, the saint, the man who, in Eckhart's phrase, is 
      ready to come down from the seventh heaven in order to bring a cup of 
      water to his sick brother. Over against the arhat, retreating from ap- 
      pearances into an entirely transcendental Nirvana, stands the Bodhisattva, 
      for whom Suchness and the world of contingencies are one, and for whose 
      boundless compassion every one of those contingencies is an occasion not 
      only for transfiguring insight, but also for the most practical charity. 
      And in the universe of art, over against Vermeer and the other Painters of 
      human still lives, over against the masters of Chinese and Japanese 
      landscape painting, over against Constable and Turner, against Sisley and 
      Seurat and Cezanne, stands the all-inclusive art of Rembrandt. These are 
      enormous names, inaccessible eminences. For myself, on this memorable May 
      morning, I could only be grateful for an experience which had shown me, 
      more clearly than I had ever seen it before, the true nature of the 
      challenge and the completely liberating response. 
      Let me add, before we leave this subject, that there is no form of 
      contemplation, even the most quietistic, which is without its ethical 
      values. Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping 
      out of mischief. The Lord's Prayer is less than fifty words long, and six 
      of those words are devoted to asking God not to lead us into temptation. 
      The one-sided contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do; 
      but to make up for it, he refrains from doing a host of things he ought 
      not to do. The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if 
      men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms. The contemplative 
      whose perception has been cleansed does not have to stay in his room. He 
      can go about his business, so completely satisfied to see and be a part of 
      the divine Order of Things that he will never even be tempted to indulge 
      in what Traherne called "the dirty Devices of the world." When we feel 
      ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when "the sea flows in our 
      veins ... and the stars are our jewels," when all things are perceived as 
      infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or 
      self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of 
      pleasure? Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, 
      or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do 
      not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor. And 
      to these enormous negative virtues we may add another which, though hard 
      to define, is both positive and important. The arhat and the quietist may 
      not practice contemplation in its fullness; but if they practice it at 
      all, they may bring back enlightening reports of another, a transcendent 
      country of the mind; and if they practice it in the height, they will 
      become conduits through which some beneficent influence can how out of 
      that other country into a world of darkened selves, chronically dying for 
      lack of it. 
      Meanwhile I had turned, at the investigator's request, from the portrait 
      of Cezanne to what was going on, inside my head, when I shut my eyes. This 
      time, the inscape was curiously unrewarding. The field of vision was 
      filled with brightly colored, constantly changing structures that seemed 
      to be made of plastic or enameled tin. 
      "Cheap," I commented. "Trivial. Like things in a five-and-ten." And all 
      this shoddiness existed in a closed, cramped universe. "It's as though one 
      were below decks in a ship," I said. "A five-and-ten-cent ship." 
      And as I looked, it became very clear that this five-and-ten-cent ship was 
      in some way connected with human pretensions, with the portrait of 
      Cezanne, with A.B. among the Dolomites overacting his favorite character 
      in fiction. This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own 
      personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal 
      contributions to the universe. 
      I felt the lesson to be salutary, but was sorry, none the less, that it 
      had had to be administered at this moment and in this form. As a rule the 
      mescalin taker discovers an inner world as manifestly a datum, as 
      self-evidently "infinite and holy," as that transfgured outer world which 
      I had seen with my eyes open. From the first, my own case had been 
      different. Mescalin had endowed me temporarily with the power to see 
      things with my eyes shut; but it could not, or at least on this occasion 
      did not, reveal an inscape remotely comparable to my flowers or chair or 
      flannels "out there." What it had allowed me to perceive inside was not 
      the Dharma-Body, in images, but my own mind; not Suchness, but a set of 
      symbols-- in other words, a homemade substitute for Suchness. 
      Most visualizers are transformed by mescalin into visionaries. Some of 
      them--and they are Perhaps more numerous than is generally 
      supposed--require no transformation; they are visionaries all the time. 
      The mental species to which Blake belonged is fairly widely dis- tributed 
      even in the urban-industrial societies of the present day. The 
      poet-artist's uniqueness does not consist in the fact that (to quote from 
      his Descriptive Catalogue) he actually saw "those wonderful originals 
      called in the Sacred Scriptures the Cherubim." It does not consist in the 
      fact that "these wonderful originals seen in my visions, were some of them 
      one hundred feet in height ... all containing mythological and recondite 
      meaning." It consists solely in his ability to render, in words or 
      (somewhat less successfully) in line and color, some hint at least of a 
      not excessively uncommon experience. The untalented visionary may perceive 
      an inner reality no less tremendous, beautiful and significant than the 
      world beheld by Blake; but he lacks altogether the ability to express, in 
      literary or plastic symbols, what he has seen. 
      From the records of religion and the surviving menuments of poetry and the 
      plastic arts it is very plain that, at most times and in most places, men 
      have attached more importance to the inscape than to objective existents, 
      have felt that what they saw with their eyes shut possessed a spiritually 
      higher significance than what they saw with their eyes open. The reason? 
      Familiarity breeds contempt, and how to survive is a problem ranging in 
      urgency from the chronically tedious to the excruciating. The outer world 
      is what we wake up to every morning of our lives, is the place where, 
      willy-nilly, we must try to make our living. In the inner world there is 
      neither work nor monotony. We visit it only in dreams and musings, and its 
      strangeness is such that we never find the same world on two successive 
      occasions. What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the 
      divine have generally preferred to look within! Generally, but not always. 
      In their art no less than in their religion, the Taoists and the Zen 
      Buddhists looked beyond visions to the Void, and through the Void at "the 
      ten thousand things" of objective reality. Because of their doctrine of 
      the Word made flesh, Christians should have been able, from the first, to 
      adopt a similar attitude towards the universe around them. But because of 
      the doctrine of the Fall, they found it very hard to do so. As recently as 
      three hundred years ago an expression of thoroughgoing world denial and 
      even world condemnation was both orthodox and comprehensible. "We should 
      feel wonder at nothing at all in Nature except only the Incarnation of 
      Christ." In the seventeenth century, Lallemant's phrase seemed to make 
      sense. Today it has the ring of madness. 
      In China the rise of landscape painting to the rank of a major art form 
      took place about a thousand, in Japan about six hundred and in Europe 
      about three hundred, years ago. The equation of Dharma-Body with hedge was 
      made by those Zen Masters, who wedded Taoist naturalism with Buddhist 
      transcendentalism. It was, therefore, only in the Far East that landscape 
      painters consciously regarded their art as religious. In the West 
      religious painting was a matter of portraying sacred personages, of 
      illustrating hallowed texts. Landscape painters regarded themselves as 
      secularists. Today we recognize in Seurat one of the supreme masters of 
      what may be called mystical landscape painting. And yet this man who was 
      able, more effectively than any other, to render the One in the many, 
      became quite indignant when somebody praised him for the "poetry" of his 
      work. '1 merely apply the System," he protested. In other words he was 
      merely a pointilliste and, in his own eyes, nothing else. A similar 
      anecdote is told of John Constable. One day towards the end of his life, 
      Blake met Constable at Hampstead and was shown one of the younger artist's 
      sketches. In spite of his contempt for naturalistic art, the old visionary 
      knew a good thing when be saw it-except of course, when it was by Rubens. 
      'This is not drawing," he cried, "this is inspiration!" "I had meant it to 
      be drawing," was Constable's characteristic answer. Both men were right. 
      It was drawing, precise and veracious, and at the same time it was 
      inspiration --inspiration of an order at least as high as Blake's. The 
      pine trees on the Heath had actually been seen as identical with the 
      Dharma-Body. The sketch was a rendering, necessarily imperfect but still 
      profoundly impressive, of what a cleansed perception had revealed to the 
      open eyes of a great painter. From a contemplation, in the tradition of 
      Wordsworth and Whitman, of the Dharma- Body as hedge, and from visions, 
      such as Blake's, of the "wonderful originals" within the mind, 
      contemporary poets have retreated into an investigation of the personal, 
      as opposed to the more than personal, subconscious and to a rendering, in 
      highly abstract terms, not of the given, objective fact, but of mere 
      scientific and theological notions. And something similar has happened in 
      the held of painting, where we have witnessed a general retreat from 
      landscape, the predominant art form of the nineteenth century. This 
      retreat from landscape has not been into that other, inner divine Datum, 
      with which most of the traditional schools of the past were concerned, 
      that Archetypal World, where men have always found the raw materials of 
      myth and religion. No, it has been a retreat from the outward Datum into 
      the personal subconscious, into a mental world more squalid and more 
      tightly closed than even the world of conscious personality. These 
      contraptions of tin and highly colored plastic --where had I seen them 
      before? In every picture gallery that exhibits the latest in 
      nonrepresentational art. 
      And now someone produced a phonograph and put a record on the turntable. I 
      listened with pleasure, but experienced nothing comparable to my seen 
      apocalypses of flowers or flannel. Would a naturally gifted musician hear 
      the revelations which, for me, had been exclusively visual? It would be 
      interesting to make the experiment. Meanwhile, though not transfigured, 
      though retaining its normal quality and intensity, the music contributed 
      not a little to my understanding of what had happened to me and of the 
      wider problems which those happenings had raised. 
      Instrumental music, oddly enough, left me rather cold. Mozart's C-Minor 
      Piano Concerto was interrupted after the first movement, and a recording 
      of some madrigals by Gesualdo took its place. 
      "These voices," I said appreciatively, "these voices-- they're a kind of 
      bridge back to the human world." 
      And a bridge they remained even while singing the most startlingly 
      chromatic of the mad prince's compositions. Through the uneven phrases of 
      the madrigals, the music pursued its course, never sticking to the same 
      key for two bars together. In Gesualdo, that fantastic character out of a 
      Webster melodrama, psychological disintegration had exaggerated, had 
      pushed to the extreme limit, a tendency inherent in modal as opposed to 
      fully tonal music. The resulting works sounded as though they might have 
      been written by the later Schoenberg. 
      "And yet," I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these 
      strange products of a Counter-Refonna- tion psychosis working upon a late 
      medieval art form, "and yet it does not matter that he's all in bits. The 
      whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a 
      representative of a Higher Order. The Highest Order prevails even in the 
      disintegration. The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More 
      clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work. At least you 
      aren't lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely 
      fabricated order. You have to rely on your immediate perception of the 
      ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its 
      advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you 
      couldn't get back, out of the chaos .. ." 
      From Gesualdo's madrigals we jumped, across a gulf of three centuries, to 
      Alban Berg and the Lyric Suire. 
      "This" I announced in advance, "is going to be hell." 
      But, as it turned out, I was wrong. Actually the music sounded rather 
      funny. Dredged up from the personal subconscious, agony succeeded 
      twelve-tone agony; but what struck me was only the essential incongruity 
      between a psychological disintegration even completer than Gesualdo's and 
      the prodigious resources, in talent and technique, employed in its 
      expression. 
      "Isn't he sorry for himself!" I commented with a derisive lack of 
      sympathy. And then, "Katzenmusik-- learned Katzenmusik." And finally, 
      after a few more minutes of the anguish, "Who cares what his feelings are? 
      Why can't he pay attention to something else?" 
      As a criticism of what is undoubtedly a very remarkable work, it was 
      unfair and inadequate-but not, I think, irrelevant. I cite it for what it 
      is worth and because that is how, in a state of pure contemplation, I 
      reacted to the Lyric Suite. 
      When it was over, the investigator suggested a walk in the garden. I was 
      willing; and though my body seemed to have dissociated itself almost 
      completely from my mind--or, to be more accurate, though my awareness of 
      the transfigured outer world was no longer accom- panied by an awareness 
      of my physical organism--I found myself able to get up, open the French 
      window and walk out with only a minimum of hesitation. It was odd, of 
      course, to feel that "I" was not the same as these arms and legs "out 
      there," as this wholly objective trunk and neck and even head. It was odd; 
      but one soon got used to it. And anyhow the body seemed perfectly well 
      able to look after itself. In reality, of course, it always does look 
      after itself. All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, 
      which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and 
      understands not at all. When it does anything more--when it tries too 
      hard, for example, when it worries, when it becomes apprehensive about the 
      future--it lowers the effectiveness of those forces and may even cause the 
      devitalized body to fall ill. In my present state, awareness was not 
      referred to as ego; it was, so to speak, on its own. This meant that the 
      physiological intelligence controlling the body was also on its own. For 
      the moment that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run 
      the show, was blessedly out of the way. 
      From the French window I walked out under a kind of pergola covered in 
      part by a climbing rose tree, in part by laths, one inch wide with half an 
      inch of space be tween them. The sun was shining and the shadows of the 
      laths made a zebra-like pattern on the ground and across the seat and back 
      of a garden chair, which was standing at this end of the pergola. That 
      chair--shall I ever forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas 
      upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes 
      of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that 
      they could be made of anything but blue fire. For what seemed an immensely 
      long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it 
      was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred 
      with alternate light and shade. Today the percept had swallowed up the 
      concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what 
      I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden 
      furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow--these were no more than names and 
      notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, 
      after the event. The event was this succession of azure furnace doors 
      separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly 
      wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And 
      suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad. 
      Schizophrenia has its heavens as well as its hells and purgatories. I 
      remember what an old friend, dead these many years, told me about his mad 
      wife. One day in the early stages of the disease, when she still had her 
      lucid intervals he had gone to talk to her about their children. She 
      listened for a time, then cut him short. How could he bear to waste his 
      time on a couple of absent children, when all that really mattered, here 
      and now, was the unspeakable beauty of the patterns he made, in this brown 
      tweed jacket, every time he moved his arms? Alas, this Paradise of 
      cleansed perception, of pure onesided contemplation, was not to endure. 
      The blissful intermissions became rarer, became briefer, until finally 
      there were no more of them; there was only horror. 
      Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of 
      schizophrenia. The drug brings hell and purgatory only to those who have 
      had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions 
      or a chronic anxiety. If, like the other drugs of remotely comparable 
      power, mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, 
      of itself, to cause anxiety. But the reasonably healthy person knows in 
      advance that, so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, 
      that its effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no 
      hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose. Fortified 
      by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without fear--in other 
      words, without any disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and 
      other than human experience into something appall- ing, something actually 
      diabolical. 
      Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment--or, to be more 
      accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with 
      considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair--I found myself all at 
      once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too 
      far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance. 
      The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of 
      disintegrat- ing under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, 
      accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could 
      possibly bear. The literature of religious experience abounds in 
      references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too 
      suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium tremendum. 
      In theological language, this fear is due to the in- compatibility between 
      man's egotism and the divine purity, between man's self-aggravated 
      separateness and the infinity of God. Following Boehme and William Law, we 
      may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze 
      can be apprehended only as a burning, purgatorial fire. An almost 
      identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where 
      the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light 
      of the Void, and even from the lesser, tempered Lights, in order to rush 
      headlong into the comforting darkness of selfhood as a reborn human being, 
      or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather 
      than the burning brightness of un- mitigated Reality--anything! 
      The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick 
      into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge 
      from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the 
      homemade universe of common sense--the strictly human world of useful 
      notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions. The 
      schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, 
      and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is 
      not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is 
      the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits 
      him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into 
      interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of 
      significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, 
      calling for the most desperate countermeasures, from murderous violence at 
      one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other. 
      And once embarked upon the downward, the infernal road, one would never be 
      able to stop. That, now, was only too obvious. 
      "If you started in the wrong way," I said in answer to the investigator's 
      questions, "everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy 
      against you. It would all be self-validating, You couldn't draw a breath 
      without knowing it was part of the plot." 
      "So you think you know where madness lies?" 
      My answer was a convinced and heartfelt, "Yes." 
      "And you couldn't control it?" 
      "No I couldn't control it. If one began with fear and hate as the major 
      premise, one would have to go on to the conclusion." 
      "Would you be able," my wife asked, "to fix your attention on what The 
      Tibetan Book of The Dead calls the Clear Light?" 
      I was doubtful. 
      "Would it keep the evil away, if you could hold it? Or would you not be 
      able to hold it?" 
      I considered the question for some time. "Perhaps," I answered at last, 
      "perhaps I could--but only if there were somebody there to tell me about 
      the Clear Light. One couldn't do it by oneself. That's the point, I 
      suppose, of the Tibetan ritual--someone sitting there all the time and 
      telling you what's what." 
      After listening to the record of this part of the ex- periment, I took 
      down my copy of Evans-Wentz's edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and 
      opened at random. "O nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted." That was 
      the problem--to remain undistracted. Undistracted by the memory of past 
      sins, by imagined pleasure, by the bitter aftertaste of old wrongs and 
      humiliations, by all the fears and hates and cravings that ordinarily 
      eclipse the Light. What those Buddhist monks did for the dying and the 
      dead, might not the modern psychiatrist do for the insane? Let there be a 
      voice to assure them, by day and even while they are asleep, that in spite 
      of all the terror, all the bewilderment and confusion, the ultimate 
      Reality remains unshakably itself and is of the same substance as the 
      inner light of even the most cruelly tormented mind. By means of such 
      devices as recorders, clock-controlled switches, public address systems 
      and pillow speakers it should be very easy to keep the inmates of even an 
      understaffed institution constantly reminded of this primordial fact. 
      Perhaps a few of the lost souls might in this way be helped to win some 
      measure of control over the universe--at once beautiful and appall- ing, 
      but always other than human, always totally incomprehensible-in which they 
      find themselves condemned to live. 
      None too soon, I was steered away from the disquiet- ing splendors of my 
      garden chair. Drooping in green parabolas from the hedge, the ivy fronds 
      shone with a kind of glassy, jade-like radiance. A moment later a clump of 
      Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision. So 
      passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of 
      utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue. Like the chair 
      under the laths, they protected too much. I looked down at the leaves and 
      discovered a cavernous intricacy of the most delicate green lights and 
      shadows, pulsing with un- decipherable mystery. 
      Roses : The flowers are easy to paint, The leaves difficult. 
      Shiki's haiku (which I quote in R. H. Blyth's translation) expresses, by 
      indirection, exactly what I then felt-- the excessive, the too obvious 
      glory of the flowers, as contrasted with the subtler miracle of their 
      foliage. 
      We walked out into the street. A large pale blue auto- mobile was standing 
      at the curb. At the sight of it, I was suddenly overcome by enormous 
      merriment. What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from 
      those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel! Man had created the thing in 
      his own image--or rather in the image of his favorite character in 
      fiction. I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks. 
      We re-entered the house. A meal had been prepared. Somebody, who was not 
      yet identical with myself, fell to with ravenous appetite. From a 
      considerable distance and without much interest, I looked on. 
      When the meal had been eaten, we got into the car and went for a drive. 
      The effects of the mescalin were already on the decline: but the flowers 
      in the gardens still trembled on the brink of being supernatural, the 
      pepper trees and carobs along the side streets still manifestly belonged 
      to some sacred grove. Eden alternated with Dodona. Yggdrasil with the 
      mystic Rose. And then, abruptly, we were at an intersection, waiting to 
      cross Sunset Boulevard. Before us the cars were rolling by in a steady 
      stream--thousands of them, all bright and shiny like an advertiser's dream 
      and each more ludicrous than the last. Once again I was convulsed with 
      laughter. 
      The Red Sea of traffic parted at last, and we crossed into another oasis 
      of trees and lawns and roses. In a few minutes we had climbed to a vantage 
      point in the hills, and there was the city spread out beneath us. Rather 
      disappointingly, it looked very like the city I had seen on other 
      occasions. So far as I was concerned, transfiguration was proportional to 
      distance. The nearer, the more divinely other. This vast, dim panorama was 
      hardly different from itself. 
      We drove on, and so long as we remained in the hills, with view succeeding 
      distant view, significance was at its everyday level, well below 
      transfiguration point. The magic began to work again only when we turned 
      down into a new suburb and were gliding between two rows of houses. Here, 
      in spite of the peculiar hideousness of the architecture, there were 
      renewals of transcendental otherness, hints of the morning's heaven. Brick 
      chimneys and green composition roofs glowed in the sunshine, like 
      fragments of the New Jerusalem. And all at once I saw what Guardi had seen 
      and (with what incomparable skill) had so often rendered in his 
      paintings--a stucco wall with a shadow slanting across it, blank but 
      unforgettably beautiful, empty but charged with all the meaning and the 
      mystery of existence. The revelation dawned and was gone again within a 
      fraction of a second. The car had moved on; time was uncovering another 
      manifestation of the eternal Suchness. "Within sameness there is 
      difference. But that difference should be different from sameness is in no 
      wise the intention of all the Buddhas. Their intention is both totality 
      and differentiation." This bank of red and white geraniums, for 
      example--it was entirely different from that stucco wall a hundred yards 
      up the road. But the "is-ness" of both was the same, the eternal quality 
      of their transience was the same. 
      An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest 
      Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to 
      that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in 
      one's right mind." 
      That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial 
      Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst 
      so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to 
      escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is 
      and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul. Art and 
      religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory--all 
      these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for 
      private, far everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants. All 
      the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on 
      trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from 
      roots--all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by 
      human beings from time immemorial. And to these natural modifiers of 
      consciousness modern science has added its quota of synthetics--chloral, 
      for example, and benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates. 
      Most of these modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken except under 
      doctor's orders, or else illegally and at considerable risk. For 
      unrestricted use the West has permitted only alcohol and tobacco. All the 
      other chemical Doors in the Wall are labeled Dope, and their unauthorized 
      takers are Fiends. 
      We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on 
      education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from 
      selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time. 
      The urge to do something for the young is strong only in parents, and in 
      them only for the few years during which their children go to school. 
      Equally unsurprising is the current attitude towards drink and smoke. In 
      spite of the growing army of hopeless alcoholics, in spite of the hundreds 
      of thousands of persons annually maimed or killed by drunken drivers, 
      popular comedians still crack jokes about alcohol and its addicts. And in 
      spite of the evidence linking cigarettes with lung cancer, practically 
      everybody regards tobacco smoking as being hardly less normal and natural 
      than eating. From the point of view of the rationalist utilitarian this 
      may seem odd. For the historian, it is exactly what you would expect. A 
      firm conviction of the material reality of Hell never prevented medieval 
      Christians from doing what their ambition, lust or covetousness suggested. 
      Lung cancer, traffic accidents and the millions of miserable and 
      misery-creating alcoholics are facts even more certain than was, in 
      Dante's day, the fact of the Inferno. But all such facts are remote and 
      unsubstantial compared with the near, felt fact of a craving, here and 
      now, for release or sedation, for a drink or a smoke. 
      Ours is the age, among other things, of the automobile and of rocketing 
      population. Alcohol is incompatible with safety on the roads, and its 
      production, like that of tobacco, condemns to virtual sterility many 
      millions of acres of the most fertile soil. The problems raised by alcohol 
      and tobacco cannot, it goes without saying, be solved by prohibition. The 
      universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be 
      abolished by slamming the currently popular Doors in the Wall. The only 
      reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing 
      men and women to exchange their old bad habits for new and less harmful 
      ones. Some of these other, better doors will be social and technological 
      in nature, others religious or psychological, others dietetic, 
      educational, athletic. But the need for frequent chemical vacations from 
      intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. 
      What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering 
      species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the 
      short. Such a drug must be potent in minute doses and synthesizable. If it 
      does not possess these qualities, its production, like that of wine, beer, 
      spirits and tobacco will interfere with the raising of indispensable food 
      and fibers. It must be less toxic than opium or cocaine, less likely to 
      produce undesirable social consequences than alcohol or the barbiturates, 
      less inimical to heart and lungs than the tars and nicotine of cigarettes. 
      And, on the positive side, it should produce changes in consciousness more 
      interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, 
      delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition. 
      To most people, mescalin is almost completely innocuous. Unlike alcohol, 
      it does not drive the taker into the kind of uninhibited action which 
      results in brawls, crimes of violence and traffic accidents. A man under 
      the influence of mescalin quietly minds his own business. Moreover, the 
      business he minds is an experience of the most enlightening kind, which 
      does not have to be paid for (and this is surely important) by a 
      compensatory hangover. Of the long-range consequences of regular mescalin 
      taking we know very little. The Indians who consume peyote buttons do not 
      seem to be physically or morally degraded by the habit. However, the 
      available evidence is still scarce and sketchy.* Although obviously 
      superior to cocaine, opium, alco- hol and tobacco, mescalin is not yet the 
      ideal drug. Along with the happily transfigured majority of mescalin 
      takers there is a minority that finds in the drug only hell or purgatory. 
      Moreover, for a drug that is to be used, like alcohol, for general 
      consumption, its effects last for an inconveniently long time. But 
      chemistry and physiology are capable nowadays of practically anything. If 
      the psychologists and sociologists will define the ideal, the neurologists 
      and pharmacologists can be relied upon to discover the means whereby that 
      ideal can be realized or at least (for perhaps this kind of ideal can 
      never, in the very nature of things, be fully realized) more nearly 
      approached than in the wine-bibbing past, the whisky- drinking, 
      marijuana-smoking and barbiturate-swallowing present. 
      The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a 
      principal appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason, men and women 
      fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spir- 
      itual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion's chemical 
      surrogates-alcohol and "goof pills" in the modern West, alcohol and opium 
      in the East, hashish in the Mohammedan world, alcohol and marijuana in 
      Central America, alcohol and coca in the Andes, alcohol and the 
      barbiturates in the more up-to-date regions of South America. In Poisons 
      Sacres, Ivresses Divines Philippe de Felice has written at length and with 
      a wealth of documentation on the immemorial connection between religion 
      and the taking of drugs. Here, in summary or in direct quotation, are his 
      conclusions. The employment for religious purposes of toxic substances is 
      "extraordinarily widespread.... The practices studied in this volume can 
      be observed in every region of the earth, among primitives no less than 
      among those who have reached a high pitch of civilization. We are 
      therefore dealing not with exceptional facts, which might justifiably be 
      overlooked, but with a general and, in the widest sense of the word, a 
      human phenomenon, the kind of phenomenon which cannot be disregarded by 
      anyone who is trying to discover what religion is, and what are the deep 
      needs which it must satisfy." 
      Ideally, everyone should be able to find self-transcend- ence in some form 
      of pure or applied religion. In practice it seems very unlikely that this 
      hoped for consummation will ever be realized. There are, and doubtless 
      there always will be, good churchmen and good churchwomen for whom, 
      unfortunately, piety is not enough. The late G. K. Chesterton, who wrote 
      at least as lyrically of drink as of devotion, may serve as their eloquent 
      spokesman. 
      The modern churches, with some exceptions among the Protestant 
      denominations, tolerate alcohol; but even the most tolerant have made no 
      attempt to convert the drug to Christianity, or to sacramentalize its use. 
      The pious drinker is forced to take his religion in one compartment, his 
      religion-surrogate in another. And perhaps this is inevitable. Drinking 
      cannot be sacramentalized except in religions which set no store on 
      decorum. The worship of Dionysos or the Celtic god of beer was a loud and 
      disorderly affair. The rites of Christianity are incompatible with even 
      religious drunkenness. This does no harm to the distillers, but is very 
      bad for Christianity. Countless persons desire self-transcendence and 
      would be glad to find it in church. But, alas, "the hungry sheep look up 
      and are not fed." They take part in rites, they listen to sermons, they 
      repeat prayers; but their thirst remains unassuaged. Disappointed, they 
      turn to the bottle. For a time at least and in a kind of way, it works. 
      Church may still be attended; but it is no more than the Musical Bank of 
      Butler's Erewhon. God may still be acknowledged; but He is God only on the 
      verbal level, only in a strictly Pickwickian sense. The effective object 
      of worship is the bottle and the sole religious experience is that state 
      of uninhibited and belligerent euphoria which follows the ingestion of the 
      third cocktail. 
      We see, then, that Christianity and alcohol do not and cannot mix. 
      Christianity and mescalin seem to be much more compatible. This has been 
      demonstrated by many tribes of Indians, from Texas to as far north as 
      Wisconsin. Among these tribes are to be found groups affiliated with the 
      Native American Church, a sect whose principal rite is a kind of Early 
      Christian agape, or love feast, where slices of peyote take the place of 
      the sacramental bread and wine. These Native Americans regard the cactus 
      as God's special gift to the Indians, and equate its effects with the 
      workings of the divine Spirit. 
      Professor J. S. Slotkin, one of the very few white men ever to have 
      participated in the rites of a Peyotist congregation, says of his fellow 
      worshipers that they are "certainly not stupefied or drunk.... They never 
      get out of rhythm or fumble their words, as a drunken or stupefied man 
      would do.... They are all quiet, courteous and considerate of one another. 
      I have never been in any white man's house of worship where there is 
      either so much religious feeling or decorum." And what, we may ask, are 
      these devout and well-behaved Peyotists experiencing? Not the mild sense 
      of virtue which sustains the average Sunday churchgoer through ninety 
      minutes of boredom. Not even those high feelings, inspired by thoughts of 
      the Creator and the Redeemer, the Judge and the Comforter, which animate 
      the pious. For these Native Americans, religious experience is something 
      more direct and illuminating, more spontaneous, less the homemade product 
      of the superficial, self-conscious mind. Sometimes (according to the 
      reports collected by Dr. Slotkin) they see visions, which may be of Christ 
      Himself. Sometimes they hear the voice of the Great Spirit. Sometimes they 
      become aware of the presence of God and of those personal shortcomings 
      which must be corrected if they are to do His will. The practical 
      consequences of these chemical openings of doors into the Other World seem 
      to be wholly good. Dr. Slotkin reports that habitual Peyotists are on the 
      whole more industrious, more temperate (many of them abstain altogether 
      from alcohol), more Peaceable than non-Peyotists. A tree with such 
      satisfactory fruits cannot be condemned out of hand as evil. 
      In sacramentalizing the use of peyote, the Indians of the Native American 
      Church have done something which is at once psychologically sound and 
      historically respectable. In the early centuries of Christianity many 
      pagan rites and festivals were baptized, so to say, and made to serve the 
      purposes of the Church. These jollifications were not particularly 
      edifying; but they assuaged a certain psychological hunger and, instead of 
      trying to suppress them, the earlier missionaries had the sense to accept 
      them for what they were, soul-satisfying expressions of fundamental urges, 
      and to incorporate them into the fabric of the new religion. What the 
      Native Americans have done is essentially similar. They have taken a pagan 
      custom (a custom, incidentally, far more elevating and enlightening than 
      most of the rather brutish carousals and mummeries adopted from European 
      paganism) and given it a Christian significance. 
      Though but recently introduced into the northern United States, 
      peyote-eating and the religion based upon it have become important symbols 
      of the red man's right to spiritual independence. Some Indians have 
      reacted to white supremacy by becoming Americanized, others by retreating 
      into traditional Indianism. But some have tried to make the best of both 
      worlds, indeed of all the worlds--the best of Indianism, the best of 
      Christianity, and the best of those Other Worlds of transcendental 
      experience, where the soul knows itself as unconditioned and of like 
      nature with the divine. Hence the Native American Church. In it two great 
      appetites of the soul-- the urge to independence and self-determination 
      and the urge to self-transcendence-were fused with, and in- terpreted in 
      the light of, a third--the urge to worship, to justify the ways of God to 
      man, to explain the universe by means of a coherent theology. 
      Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind 
      Clothes him in front, but leaves him bare behind. 
      But actually it is we, the rich and highly educated whites, who have left 
      ourselves bare behind. We cover our anterior nakedness with some 
      philosophy-Christian, Marxian, Freudo-Physicalist-but abaft we remain 
      uncovered, at the mercy of all the winds of circumstance. The poor Indian, 
      on the other hand, has had the wit to protect his rear by supplementing 
      the fig leaf of a theology with the breechclout of transcendental 
      experience. 
      I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of 
      mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with 
      the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: 
      Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the 
      mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous 
      grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be 
      accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of 
      ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and 
      the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or 
      to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are 
      apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large--this is an 
      experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intel- 
      lectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in 
      Goethe's phrase, "the word is essentially fruitful." He is the man who 
      feels that "what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need 
      not impress us deeply." And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of 
      the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own 
      evaluation of the word. "We talk," he wrote in middle life, "far too much. 
      We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce 
      speech altogether and, like organic Nature, com- municate everything I 
      have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on 
      my window sill quietly awaiting its future-all these are momentous 
      signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be 
      able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more 
      I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to 
      say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her 
      silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, 
      before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills." We can 
      never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by 
      means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves 
      above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become 
      the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn 
      how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve 
      and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and 
      not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every 
      given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or 
      explanatory abstraction. 
      Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is 
      predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed 
      to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it 
      turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of 
      Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world 
      students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or 
      anyone else's. 
      Gestalt psychologists, such as Samuel Renshaw, have devised methods for 
      widening the range and increasing the acuity of human perceptions. But do 
      our educators apply them? The answer is, No. 
      Teachers in every field of psyche-physical skill, from seeing to tennis, 
      from tightrope walking to prayer, have discovered, by trial and error, the 
      conditions of optimum functioning within their special fields. But have 
      any of the great Foundations financed a project for co-ordinating these 
      empirical findings into a general theory and practice of heightened 
      creativeness? Again, so far as I am aware, the answer is, No. 
      All sorts of cultists and queer fish teach all kinds of techniques for 
      achieving health, contentment, peace of mind; and for many of their 
      hearers many of these techniques are demonstrably effective. But do we see 
      respectable psychologists, philosophers and clergymen boldly descending 
      into those odd and sometimes malodorous wells, at the bottom of which poor 
      Truth is so often condemned to sit? Yet once more the answer is, No. 
      And now look at the history of mescalin research. Seventy years ago men of 
      first-rate ability described the transcendental experiences which come to 
      those who, in good health, under proper conditions and in the right 
      spirit, take the drug. How many philosophers, how many theologians, how 
      many professional educators have had the curiosity to open this Door in 
      the Wall? The answer, for all practical purposes, is, None. 
      In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people 
      find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words 
      and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, 
      the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the 
      all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this 
      age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal 
      humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our 
      existence, ale almost completely ignored. A catalogue, a bibliography, a 
      definitive edition of a third-rate versier's ipsissima verba, a stupendous 
      index to end all in- dexes-any genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of 
      approval and financial support: But when it comes to finding out how you 
      and I, our children and grand- children, may become more perceptive, more 
      intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, 
      less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, 
      and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system--when it 
      comes to any form of non-verbal education more fundamental (and more 
      likely to be of some practical use) than Swedish drill, no really 
      respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do 
      anything about it. Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; 
      rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that 
      "what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as 
      such and need not impress us deeply." Besides, this malter of education in 
      the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the established 
      pigeonholes. It is not religion, not neurology, not gymnastics, not 
      morality or civics, not even experimental psychology. This being so the 
      subject is, for academic and ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may 
      safely be ignored altogether or left, with a Patronizing smile, to those 
      whom the Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans and 
      unqualified amateurs. 
      "I have always found," Blake wrote rather bitterly, "that Angels have the 
      vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise. This they do with a 
      confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning." 
      Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as 
      individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, 
      can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the 
      better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This 
      given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits 
      of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended. It is a 
      transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be 
      present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be 
      enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent 
      otherness-to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as 
      an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever 
      expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have 
      always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly 
      difficult for ourselves. Meanwhile, however, there are gratuitous graces 
      in the form of partial and fleeting realizations. Under a more realistic, 
      a less exclusively verbal system of education than ours, every Angel (in 
      Blake's sense of that word) would be permitted as a sabbatical treat, 
      would be urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional 
      trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of 
      transcendental experience. If it terrified him, it would be unfortunate 
      but probably salutary. If it brought him a brief but timeless 
      illumination, so much the better. In either case the Angel might lose a 
      little of the confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning and 
      the consciousness of having read all the books. 
      Near the end of his life Aquinas experienced Infused Contemplation. 
      Thereafter he refused to go back to work on his unfinished book. Compared 
      with this, everything he had read and argued about and written--Aristotle 
      and the Sentences, the Questions, the Propositions, the majestic 
      Summas-was no better than chaff or straw, For most intellectuals such a 
      sit-down strike would be inadvisable, even morally wrong. But the Angelic 
      Doctor had done more systematic reasoning than any twelve ordinary Angels, 
      and was already ripe for death. He had earned the right, in those last 
      months of his mortality, to turn away from merely symbolic straw and chaff 
      to the bread of actual and substantial Fact. For Angels of a lower order 
      and with better prospects of longevity, there must be a return to the 
      straw. But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never 
      be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less 
      cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his 
      ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to 
      things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it 
      tries, forever vainly, to comprehend. 

      + See the following papers: "Schizophrenia. A New Approach." By Humphry 
      Osmond and John Smythies. Journal of Mental Science. Vol. XCVIII. April, 
      1952. 
      "On Being Mad." By Humphry Osmond. Saskarchewan Psychiatric Services 
      Journal. Vol. I. No. 2. September. 1952. 
      "The Mescalin Phenomena." By John Smythies. The British Journal of the 
      Philosophy of Science. Vol. III. February, 1953. 
      "Schizophrenia: A New Approach." By Abeam Hoffer, Humphry Osmond and John 
      Smythies. journal of Mental Science. Vol. C. No. 418. January, 1954. 
      Numerous other papers on the biochemistry, pharmacology, psy- chology and 
      neurophysiology of schizophrenia sad the mescalin phe- nomena are in 
      preparation. 


      *In his monograph, Menomini Peyolism, published (December 1952) in the 
      Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Professor J. S. 
      Slotkin has written that "the habitual use of Peyote does not seem to 
      produce any increased tolerance or dependence. I know many people who have 
      been Peyotists for forty to fifty years. The amount of Peyote they use 
      depends upon the solemnity of the occasion; in general they do not take 
      any more Peyote now than they did years ago. Also, there is sometimes an 
      interval of a month or more between rites, and they go without Peyote 
      during this period without feeling any craving for it. Personally, even 
      after a series of rites occurring on four successive weekends. I neither 
      increased the amount of Peyote consumed nor felt any continued need for 
      it." It is evidently with good reason that "Peyote has never been legally 
      declared a narcotic, or its use prohibited by the federal government." 
      However, "during the long history of Indian-white contact, white offcials 
      have usually tried to suppress the use of Peyote, because it has been 
      conceived to violate their own mores. But these at- tempts have always 
      failed." In a footnote Dr. Slotkin adds that "it is amazing to hear the 
      fantastic stories about the effects of Peyote and the nature of the 
      ritual, which are told by the white and Catholic Indian officials in the 
      Menomini Reservation. None of them have had the slightest first-hand 
      experience with the plant or with the religion, yet some fancy themselves 
      to be authorities and write official reports on the subject." 





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